Life, Death and the Pursuit of Happiness

By the time you’re done reading this sentence, someone will have passed away. I know…bleak beginning, but it’s true. Whether it was an accident, murder, suicide or just natural causes, someone has left this world. Maybe they left loved ones, maybe they didn’t, but they took their final breath the second you were done reading the first sentence. They might have never had a chance to say goodbye to anyone they loved. But for some reason or another, it was their time. Have you ever thought about who would be at your funeral if you passed? Who would cry because you were no longer in their life?

Again, I apologize for the terrible intro. But the ying to that yangish-beginning is that someone was brought into this world at that same moment. They get to have a whole new experience, and for the first 10-20 years of their life, they will be plopped into a scenario that they have no control over. A newborn can’t pick its family, economic situation, abnormalities, social status or race. A kid was just born into a rich family. Another kid was born into a single parent household that is going to work several underpaid jobs just to make sure they get at least one meal per day. Or maybe they’ll never know their real parents, have parents of a different race, have a mental handicap, be ridden with health problems or receive some kind of poor genetic trait. And what are they going to do about it? There’s nothing they can do. Babies are just eating, pooping, crying blackholes. It’s like have a gas-guzzling car that’s 25-years-old. You keep throwing money at it, trying to take care of it, and for some reason, you still love it.

Did you know that there’s baby cologne? If you didn’t before, you do now. I have no idea why someone would want to buy that for their child. Most of the time they smell like poop or throw-up, and you can cover that up by…I don’t know…cleaning it. The only time I use cologne is because I’m too lazy to take a shower, and the shirt I’m wearing was worn for like 5 hours the day before, which in Guy Code, means its perfectly fine to wear again before washing it.

Babies creep me out. Believe me, I can’t wait to have kids. I would just rather have them when they’re like…2. I don’t know what it is. I guess I don’t know what to do with them. I’m not sure if I ever want to hold an infant because I don’t really know how. And instead of not trying, I just avoid it. To be honest, I do the same with people who have a mental handicap. Not the part about holding them, but I have a hard time understanding what it would be like to live like that and instead of learning, I just avoid the situation altogether. I would rather walk up to a scary group of guys at night and ask them for the time. And I think it’s because I grew up with situations like that, where the scariest looking people can also be the nicest. I didn’t grow up with babies or any mentally handicapped people.

Maybe I’m just a huge idiot. Yeah, I’m probably just a huge idiot. I’m sure there will be a point in my life where I hold my kid before they are freakin 2-years-old. And there are plenty of opportunities for me to interact with mentally handicapped people. Addressing a fear is half of the solution. Doing something about it means you conquer it.

Growing up is tough. You can’t pick your family when you’re born. But after that, you can choose who you call family. The people that you decide to surround yourself around drastically affect who you become and how you act. And by choosing those people, you’re choosing who you want to be. I am a product of the individuals around me. I want to be a good person, so I surround myself with good people. In return, they choose to accept me into their family and together, we make each other better.

But there will also be times when you choose people that you think are family, and they turn out that they just made a fake birth certificate. Maybe someone burned you a couple times and divorced themselves from your family. But as long as you learn from it and aren’t bitter because of it, it doesn’t mean that they were mistakes. They were probably rough, rough experiences, but every experience contains a lesson.

Life is like one big square dance. Sometimes you have different people in your life and you pass each other along. But it’s not about those individual people, it’s about the experience that everyone had. And I hope my square dance is filled with good family, people who I learn from, infants and the mentally handicapped.